Blog

Quite the windfall of web press this autumn! We're giving you a veritable Octoberfest of all the buzz that's piled up since August. Without further ado, here's what's been happening over the last couple months:

Lauren O'Neal explores Jack White's move from music to publishing with Language Lessons: Volume 1 - an anthology of poetry and prose that features work by Black Ocean poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson and our very own publisher, Janaka Stucky:

"Because the book and associated materials are so self-consciously, ostentatiously analog — you certainly can’t download any of the words, sounds, or images to your smartphone — a delicious tension between the old and the new runs through them like a livewire."

Ilustration and design artist Abby Hadican shares the inspiration and thought process behind her design for the cover of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics. You can see high-res images on her blog.

The Boston Globe featured a short write-up on the Privacy Policy anthology as a prelude to our Boston launch reading. It features a quote from our publisher, Janaka, along with how Andrew Ridker came up with the idea during a summer at Boston Review.

You can read Drew Kalbach's thoughts on the intersections of drone intimacy, data, poetry, and the concept of spectacle in his review of the Privacy Policy for Entropy Magazine:

"In this conception of the anthology, the personal weighs itself against the catalogued in a different kind of humanism. But it isn’t humanism, not exactly, because the human is constantly being pressed up against the incredibly inhuman, asynchronous networked reality of massive data collection."

Brian Foley was the featured poet for October at Take Down the Clouds. You can read a short interview with him here.

You can read a sample from Max Hjortsberg's drone poem (featured in Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics) on his blog!

Zach Savich reviewed Ralph Angel's Your Moon (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2014) for The Philadelphia Review of Books: "The present, it turns out, is about more than right now. Your Moon brings us to that more. Brings might be the wrong word; we are already there." Read the full review here.

How is 'reporting' different from 'witnessing' in surveillance poetry? Andrew Ridker discusses in this interview with The Writing University:

"Working towards a definition of 'surveillance poetics' has been a fascinating process... Many of these poems take techno-governmental practice and language into account in the composition process. Perhaps a surveillance poem is one with a meta-awareness of poetry’s codes and observations, and one which manipulates this awareness into art."

The Heavy Feather Review gives their two cents on how the self is presented in Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable:

"By not shoving everything together, Gabbert admits that the only way to create a whole book (or a whole self, perhaps) is to weave together separate threads. In other words, the book’s standard-looking format might, itself, be a total meta move once you start thinking like the book is thinking. And that is the whole point of reading this beautiful thing." You can read the full review here.